The CFP below is for the SPMRL-SANCL Main Workshop. The workshop also features:

Second Shared Task on Semi-Supervised Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages

Special Track on the Syntactic Analysis of Non-Canonical Language

Follow the links for more details on the Shared Task and Special Track.

Motivation
Statistical parsing of morphologically-rich languages (MRLs) and syntactic analysis of non-canonical languages (NCL) have shown several similar properties and challenges in recent research. Therefore, this year we organize a joint workshop of these two research communities, to foster cross-pollination of ideas and technology for both.

Statistical parsing of morphologically-rich languages has repeatedly been shown to exhibit non-trivial challenges including, among others, sparse lexica in the face of rich inflectional systems, parsing deficiency in the face of free word order and treebank annotation idiosyncrasies in the face of morphosyntactic interactions.

Similar problems arise for parsing of non-canonical languages. Besides technical issues such as lexical sparseness and ad-hoc structures, we also face theoretical problems including constructions that do not occur, or very seldom occur, in standard language, such as verbless sentences or complex hashtags.

The first joint SPMRL-SANCL workshop addresses both the challenge of parsing MRLs and NCL. It provides a forum for researchers addressing the often overlapping issues of both fields with the goal of identifying cross-cutting issues in the annotation and parsing methodology for such languages.

Areas of Interest
The areas of interest of the SPMRL-SANCL workshop include, but are not limited to, the following list of topics:

applying cutting-edge parsing techniques to new languages and domains

identifying the strengths and weaknesses of current parsing techniques when applied to morphologically-rich and/or non-canonical language

using insights from parsing and associated processing problems to motivate decisions in the creation of new syntactically annotated corpora ("treebanks"), especially in domains, genres, and languages that are not yet, or hardly covered; tag set design

discussing the role of parsing in higher-level NLP applications involving MRLs and NCLs, e.g. syntax-enhanced MT and semantic analysis.

Second Shared Task on Semi-Supervised Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages
The workshop will also host the second shared task on parsing morphologically rich language (see http://spmrl.org/spmrl2014-sharedtask.html). The first shared task was held in conjunction with SPMRL 2013. It helped show that carefully engineered approaches can help to push the envelope on languages such as Hungarian, Basque, Hebrew and Polish, where the shared task results for constituency parsing are the best current known for those languages. The task embodied a focus on realistic scenarios (no gold tokenization, no gold part-of-speech or morphology), as well as meaningful evaluation measures, including a cross-framework evaluation that permits comparisons between constituent and dependency parsing models.

The second installment of the Shared Task will feature a similar range of languages. Moreover, it will also consider a semi-supervised scenario where larger quantities of in-domain text are available. These unlabeled data are aimed to be used for self-training, co-training, lexical acquisition, generating word clusters, word embeddings and so on. A separate call for the Shared Task is forthcoming.

Special Track on Syntactic Analysis of Non-Canonical Language
In addition to regular paper submissions, we solicit poster submissions addressing the syntactic analysis of frequent phenomena of non-canonical language, which are difficult to annotate and parse using conventional annotation schemes. Cases in point are the representation of verbless utterances in a dependency scheme, the pros and cons of different representations of disfluencies for statistical parsing, or the analysis of complex hashtags which incorporate and merge different syntactic arguments into one token. The posters should focus, in more detail, on one more of these issues. More details on the submission categories for the poster session can be found below and at: http://spmrl.org/sancl-posters2014.html .

Long papers are most appropriate for presenting substantial and completed research addressing a topic relevant to either SANCL or SPMRL.

Short papers are suited for presenting work in progress, position papers or short, focused contributions, relevant to either SANCL or SPMRL (including the poster session topics described above and, in more detail, here).

Both long and short papers should present original, unpublished research. They will be peer reviewed and will be presented as either an oral talk or as a poster at the workshop. Long/short papers will be included in the proceedings. Abstract submissions are most appropriate for presenting an idea for an analysis for one or more of the poster topics. In contrast to long/short paper submissions, abstract submissions do not need to back up their ideas with experimental results. Abstract submission will receive a yes/no review and will not be included in the proceedings.